Biostar TForce TF570 SLI - What You Get continued
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Now it's time to investigate the slots. Since this is an SLI motherboard, two 16x slots are the minimum. We’ve seen 3 or 4 now, but 2 will do. There are three PCI slots, because PCI-Express doesn’t feel like catching on I guess. For those ever so limited PCI-Express devices, we've got two slots for you too.
Between the two 16x PCI-Express slots we find the chipset. This is an odd place for it and not a good one. With the modern computer, the video cards are quickly becoming the hottest part of a computer. Now throw two of them into a motherboard. Biostar decided to put it between these two mini heaters? I'm not sure of the logic behind this. The heatsink isn’t very expensive either. It feels and looks cheap to me.
On the other side of the top PCI–Express 16x slot we find a power connector. I mean right on the other side. It is a very tight squeeze for that connector. Also if your card's back is high, it could interfere with this plug.
As we move back up to the top, we find the ATX power connector. What the hell is it doing here? That's not a very accessible spot to put it. I much prefer it next to the memory slots and out of the way.
What I don’t see anywhere near the top of the motherboard are any fan connectors. The only two I can find are at the bottom of the board, which is not good if you want a fan up by the CPU area where it’s hot.
Finally we will take a look at the ports it offers. You still get your standard PS2 ports for a mouse and keyboard. Next up is a serial port. Yes, they still come with one of those. I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with it. I’ve never used a device with serial connection. Even my 1995 Gateway computer had a USB port. We have 6 USB, and dual gigabit Ethernet connectors. This is a lot for a budget board; I was expecting half of that for both. Finally rounding it out are the audio connections.
This motherboard utilizes the nVidia 570 SLI chipset. This is a higher level chipset being offered by nVidia. It isn’t the highest, but it isn’t the lowest SLI chipset. The top of the line is the 590 SLI and the bottom is 500 SLI. The top of the line has two 16x slots with 16x PCI-Express lanes.
The 570 SLI is like the first SLI boards that came out; it has two physical 16x slots, but when in SLI mode, it has to split this into two 8x PCI-Express lanes. This isn’t a huge issue. When you put two top of the line video cards in, you can fill up those 8x slots fairly easy.
The only other major change from the 590 compared to the 570 is the lack of Linkboost. This isn’t a big deal at all. Linkboost is merely an auto configuration for a slightly better system performance. It may try and overclock some parts and try to optimize others. The rest of the features are similar or the same for both chipsets. Performance wise we shouldn’t see much, if any, difference between the 590 and 570 chipsets.
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